Enchantment (5 page)

“Ah,” said Piotr.

“A woman’s value doesn’t come from childbearing and obedience. It comes from her boldly making decisions—like Eve’s decision to eat the fruit and
know
something. It was Adam who followed
her
; she was the rebel, he was the follower. And yet what is it called, ‘the Fall of
Adam
’!”

“That’s what the Christians call it, anyway,” said Piotr. His bemusement was growing.

“It’s the Bible of scarcity that makes Jews think they have the right to displace the Palestinians. In the feminine Bible, the lamb lies down with the lion.”

“Lions are always glad when lambs act like that,” said Piotr. “Saves all that energy wasted in hunting and chasing.”

“Now you’re teasing me,” said Ruthie, reverting from feminist lecturer to sweet little thing when the latter seemed like the best way to win. And sure enough, Piotr at once began to backpedal.

“Of course, I know you didn’t mean it that way, I was joking,” he said.

“You must think I’m some kind of radical or apostate or something,” said Ruthie.

No, thought Esther. I just think you’re a girl who has seized upon the philosophy that will allow you not to bear children to my son, whom you’re not supposed to marry.

“Of course not,” said Piotr.

“But Esther does,” said Ruthie.

There it was, the gauntlet thrown down.

“I’m sure it was an interesting class,” said Esther. “But you know how hard it is for me to follow English.”

Ruthie got the faintest smirk on her face. “Ivan says you understand English fine except when you don’t want to.”

So the boy was more observant than she had thought. “Is that what Vanya says?” Esther answered, letting herself sound a little hurt. “Maybe he’s right. When I’m upset, it’s harder to concentrate on listening to English.”

“So I did say something to upset you,” said Ruthie.

“I’m upset that my boy should be so heartless as to postpone coming home to his fiancée. It must be breaking your poor heart. Not having your young man, now
that’s
scarcity,
nu
?”

The conversation returned to safer ground, and after a few more minutes Ruthie announced she must head home to see her parents.

“You mean you came here first, before you saw your own mother?” asked Esther. “You’re so sweet.”

“She was hoping for word from our son the nonwriter of letters,” said Piotr.

With a laugh and kisses all around, Ruthie left.

“ ‘Nu’?”
asked Piotr as soon as Ruthie was gone. “Are you suddenly taking up Yiddish?”

“I hear it from women in the synagogue, I pick it up,” said Esther.

Piotr switched to Russian. “And here I believed you when you told me your family had been Jews living in Russia even before the Goths came through, long before Yiddish was invented in Germany.”

“You never believed that,” said Esther mildly. “You read it in a history somewhere that Russian Jews all migrated in from Germany and so you know my family tradition can’t be true.”

“Why not?” he said. “Does it matter? What it means is that you keep your own set of rules. Jews so ancient that they don’t think the Talmud deserves all the authority it gets. Jews who can make a sandwich of beef and cheese.”

“But not
ham
and cheese,” she said, smiling.

“That Ruthie,” said Piotr. “Do you think she really believes that feminist nonsense about the nice feminine Bible hidden inside the nasty masculine Bible?”

“She does for now,” said Esther. “But like most college feminists, she’s not going to let the theory stop her from marrying.”

“And you’re an expert on this?”

“I hear the women at synagogue talking about their daughters.” She imitated them in English. “ ‘Oy! The younger generation always knows more than the older! Two thousand years Jewish women have more rights than Christian women ever had, but suddenly we’re oppressed, and it takes my daughter to tell me?’ ”

Piotr laughed at her take on the matrons of the synagogue. “You know what I was thinking? She got so excited when she was spouting this ahistorical countertextual nonsense, and I caught myself thinking, ‘What an idiot her teacher must be,’ and thinking about her teacher made me realize—the kind of excitement she was showing as she mindlessly spouted back the nonsense she learned in college, that’s just like the excitement some of my own students show. And it occurred to me that what we professors think of as a ‘brilliant student’ is nothing but a student who is enthusiastically converted to whatever idiotic ideas we’ve been teaching them.”

“Self-knowledge is a painful thing,” said Esther. “To learn that your best students are parrots after all.”

“Ah, but students who fill their heads with my ideas and spew them back on command, they are at least saying intelligent things, even if they all come from me.”

“Especially if they all come from you.”

“It’s my mission in life.” He kissed her. “Filling empty heads.”

“And mine is filling empty stomachs,” she said. “Now that she’s gone, we can have supper. I only had two pork chops, I couldn’t have shared with her.”

He looked at her sharply for a moment, then realized she was joking. “Really, what’s for dinner?”

“Soup,” she said. “Can’t you smell it?”

“The house always smells like good food,” said Piotr. “It’s the perfume of love.”

Over supper, they talked of many things and, sometimes, talked not at all, enjoying the comfortable silence that comes from long friendship, from shared life. Only when she was rising from the table to carry dishes to the sink did Esther broach the subject that was most on her mind.

“Do you think there’s any chance that Vanya’s lack of letters to Ruthie means that he doesn’t want to marry her after all?”

“No,” said Piotr. “I think he isn’t thinking about her. He’s thinking about his work.”

“And when you’re working, you don’t love me?” asked Esther.

“We’re married,” he said, “and you’re here.”

“And if you were in Russia like Vanya, you wouldn’t write to me either?”

He thought for just a moment. “I wouldn’t go without you,” he finally said.

“Very carefully chosen words,” she said.

“I wouldn’t be without you,” he repeated. “Without you, I wouldn’t be.”

She kissed him and then washed the dishes as he returned to reading and grading student papers.

Cousin Marek was as good as his word, sitting there in one of the village trucks waiting for him. “Everyone’s glad you’re back,” he said. “All grown.” Marek laughed. “A Jewish scholar is supposed to have glasses and clutch a book.”

“I do my share of book clutching. Can’t help it that my eyes are still good.”

“I was teasing you. Because you have shoulders. Seeing you as a boy, who would have guessed?”

The pole vault, the discus, the javelin, putting the shot, that’s what had given him shoulders like a blacksmith. Sprints and hurdles, those were the cause of his thighs. Mile after mile of endurance running, that was what kept him lithe and lean. And all of this would sound foolish, Ivan knew, to a man whose massive muscles all came from the labor of farming. Ivan’s body had been shaped by competition and meditation, Marek’s by making the earth produce something for other people to eat. It didn’t feel right to Ivan, to talk much about athletics. So he turned the subject back onto Marek himself. “You must still be carrying that calf up the stairs.”

Marek looked puzzled.

“American joke,” said Ivan. “A tall tale. The story is, a farmer carried a calf up the stairs every day. His wife asked him why, he says, ‘I want to be strong enough to carry him when he’s a bull.’ ”

Marek thought for a moment. “Bull won’t let you carry him up the stairs, even if he’d fit.”

“That’s why it’s a joke.”

Marek burst out laughing and punched Ivan heavily on the arm. “You think I don’t get this joke? Only it’s a Ukrainian joke, Ukrainians must have carried this joke to America!”

Ivan laughed and tried not to rub his arm. He might have muscles, but it wasn’t as if he’d ever boxed or wrestled or anything. He wasn’t used to getting punched. He wondered if Cousin Marek had punched Father a lot when he lived here. That would explain why Father wanted never to come back.

It was after dark when they got to the farm. The place seemed strange, until Marek explained the differences. “New henhouses over there,” he said. “There’s more of a market for eggs now, so we grow them, ship them straight to L’viv in refrigerator cars. Capitalism! And everything looks so bright because we have enough electricity that you can turn on the lights in every room in the house at once.”

“But you never actually do that,” said Ivan.

“No, no, of course not,” said Marek. “There are two of us, so there should never be more than two lights on at once, and only one when we’re in the same room. Now you’re here, sometimes
three
lights!” He laughed again.

Marek’s wife, Sophia, had incredible quantities of food waiting for Ivan—crepes filled with cottage cheese and topped with sour cream, meat-filled cabbage rolls, broth with beads of fat floating on the surface, dumplings filled with fruit, mushrooms stewed in sour cream. He knew enough to plunge in and eat until he felt sick. There was nothing else he could do, unless he wanted to offend them his first night. “I never eat this much at home,” he explained. “You can’t fix so much food for me in the future, I’ll get sick.”

“Look at you, all skin and bones, complaining about too much food,” said Sophia. She pinched at his arm, expecting apparently to find it as slender as when he was a boy. Instead, she found herself having to use two hands to span his upper arm. Marek roared with laughter. “Not so skinny,” said Marek.

“Hitch up the old oxplow,” said Sophia. “As long as he’s here to pull, we don’t need to use the tractor.”

They had prepared the same bed he had slept in as a boy, but everyone had to laugh when they realized that it was like trying to play a piano sonata on an accordion. He wasn’t going to fit. So he ended up sleeping in the bed his parents had shared.

He didn’t sleep well, however. The bed was softer than what he was used to, and it was a strange place; or maybe it’s because it wasn’t a strange place, but rather a familiar one from a time of great stress in his childhood, but whatever the cause, he kept waking up. Finally, just at dawn, he woke up needing to pee so badly that he couldn’t lie in bed any longer. Tired as he still was, sore from tossing and turning, he had to wince his way out of bed and into some clothes. Here in the foothills, spring wasn’t so far advanced, and it would be cold, heading for the outhouse.

Once he was outside, though, hugging himself against the cold and peering through a cloud of his own breath in the faint dawn light, he realized that the outhouse wasn’t where he remembered. The henhouses were there now. He began to circle the house, looking for a well-worn path that would show where the outhouse was now. He made a complete circuit of the house, and then, thinking he must have overlooked the building in his weariness and the dim light, he began another circuit. It was only Cousin Marek on the porch, laughing at him, that made him realize his mistake.

“You never heard of indoor toilets, boy?” asked Marek. “Where did you pee last night?”

“I peed at the station,” Ivan answered. “I ate and just fell into bed and slept when I got here.”

Marek pointed out the add-on structure on the gable end of the house. “One bathroom upstairs, one downstairs, just like America,” he said. “Cost me a whole year’s profit plus half a beef each to the plumber and the electrician, but Sophia says it’s worth it, not having to trudge outside all winter long.”

“Lead me to it,” said Ivan, “before I explode.”

Breakfast threatened to be as heavy as dinner, from the sounds Sophia was making in the kitchen. Ivan couldn’t keep eating at that pace. So before he went out for his morning run, he stopped in the kitchen and gave Sophia a hug and greeted her and then said, “I’ll only stay until I’ve eaten enough food to equal twice my body weight. At the rate you’re cooking, that means I’ll be heading out sometime tomorrow afternoon.”

She laughed as if it were a joke.

“Sophia, I beg you.” He got down on his knees. “I’m an athlete, I run, I can’t eat so much.”

“Eat what you want, nobody’s putting a gun to your head,” she said.

“I’m afraid of seeing your frown, if I take small helpings. I’m afraid of hurting the feelings of the greatest cook in all Ukraine.”

“What do I care about
her
?” she demanded. “You won’t hurt
my
feelings, because I take no pride in my cooking, I know it’s plain food, you must have much better food in America.”

Ivan laughed and kissed her, but he knew he was doomed. If he didn’t want to spend his whole visit hearing how much better American food must be compared to the miserable Ukrainian fare that she did such a bad job of cooking, he would eat copious helpings of everything.

So he’d better get in a good long run today, and plenty of work. Though what work there might be for him he couldn’t guess—the farm must be fully mechanized by now, and Ivan had never driven a tractor in his life. He wouldn’t know how to begin plowing or planting.

He jogged to the road, stretched against the stiffness of his joints and the cold of the morning, then took off at an easy loping pace that he knew he could keep up half the day, or longer. To survive Sophia’s copious meals, he would have to have a good long run every day. Maybe two.

The roads had been improved a little, too. Not much, for these last few years hadn’t been easy in the Soviet Union. Not a lot of money for capital expenditures or infrastructure maintenance. Yet the roads were smoothly graded. Maybe the locals got together and did it themselves, not waiting for government to come in with money. That’s how government began, wasn’t it? Collective labor. And then somebody got lazy and hired a substitute, and pretty soon it was all taxes instead of the sweat of your back. But it began here, on roads like these, villagers with axes cutting down trees, with picks and spades and prybars pulling out stumps, with sledges and scrapers leveling the road. That’s work even I could do, thought Ivan. But it’s already done.